Public Funding Increases Abortion

I've heard abortion supporters say over and over again that taxpayer funding of abortion doesn't increase abortion.  Baloney.  Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean made the same claim recently to the press.

Here's John McCormack's account of it in a short excerpt from his Weekly Standard Article, "Howard Dean's Abortion Contortions, The DNC chairman gets his facts wrong." 06/12/2008

YESTERDAY MORNING AT the Christian Science Monitor breakfast meeting, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean was asked whether the Democratic platform on abortion should be amended. That will be up to Barack Obama and his delegates, Dean said, adding that the Democratic party believes "individuals have a right to make up their own minds in personal matters ... but this party also believes that we ought to significantly reduce the number of abortions in this country."

Given the latter, I asked how he could square Barack Obama's and the Democratic party's support for public funding for abortion--which studies show significantly increases the abortion rate.

Dean responded: "Total nonsense. It's total nonsense that public funding" increases the abortion rate.

Well, according to the Guttmacher Institute, that's not total nonsense.

A 1994-1995 AGI survey of abortion patients found that in states where Medicaid pays for abortions, women covered by Medicaid have an abortion rate 3.9 times that of women who are not covered, while in states that do not permit Medicaid funding for abortions, Medicaid recipients are only 1.6 times as likely as nonrecipients to have abortions.

A more recent study by Dr. Michael New of the University of Alabama found: "State laws restricting the use of Medicaid funds in paying for abortions reduced the abortion rate by 29.66" abortions per 1,000 women of childbearing age.

After I pointed out the Guttmacher research on taxpayer funding and the abortion rate, Dean said: "If the Guttmacher Institute has said it would, I'm not going to argue with the Guttmacher Institute, but I can tell you as the governor of one of the four states which provides public funding, I find that hard to believe because our rate is not higher than the rate of corresponding states nearby."

Wrong again. Howard Dean became Vermont's governor in 1991. In 1992, Vermont's abortion rate was 67 percent higher than New Hampshire's, in 1994 it was 55 percent higher, and in 1996 it was 100 percent higher.

Click here to read the rest of McCormack's article.

Mark Crutcher of Life Dynamics in Denton, TX has noted for years that abortion is what he calls  a marginal decision. That is, if you make access to abortion a little more difficult, like raising prices, the number of abortions go down.  It doesn't take much to keep many of them from having an abortion.  Women are not willing to crawl over broken glass to have one.  This is explains why taxpayer funding would increase abortion.  Like any subsidized activity or commodity, subsidizing brings more of it.